Such for instance is the favour that villainy finds; the neglect that merit, even the rarest and the greatest, suffers at the hands of those of the same profession; the hatred of truth and great capacity; the ignorance of scholars in their own province; and the fact that true wares are almost always despised and the merely specious ones in request.  Therefore let even the young be instructed betimes that in this masquerade the apples are of wax, the flowers of silk, the fish of pasteboard, and that all things—­yes, all things—­are toys and trifles; and that of two men whom he may see earnestly engaged in business, one is supplying spurious goods and the other paying for them in false coin.

But there are more serious reflections to be made, and worse things to be recorded.  Man is at bottom a savage, horrible beast.  We know it, if only in the business of taming and restraining him which we call civilisation.  Hence it is that we are terrified if now and then his nature breaks out.  Wherever and whenever the locks and chains of law and order fall off and give place to anarchy, he shows himself for what he is.  But it is unnecessary to wait for anarchy in order to gain enlightenment on this subject.  A hundred records, old and new, produce the conviction that in his unrelenting cruelty man is in no way inferior to the tiger and the hyaena.  A forcible example is supplied by a publication of the year 1841 entitled Slavery and the Internal Slave Trade in the United States of North America:  being replies to questions transmitted by the British Anti-slavery Society to the American Anti-slavery Society.[1] This book constitutes one of the heaviest indictments against the human race.  No one can put it down with a feeling of horror, and few without tears.  For whatever the reader may have ever heard, or imagined, or dreamt, of the unhappy condition of slavery, or indeed of human cruelty in general, it will seem small to him when he reads of the way in which those devils in human form, those bigoted, church-going, strictly Sabbatarian rascals—­and in particular the Anglican priests among them—­treated their innocent black brothers, who by wrong and violence had got into their diabolical clutches.

[Footnote 1:  Translator’s ’Note.—­If Schopenhauer were writing to-day, he would with equal truth point to the miseries of the African trade.  I have slightly abridged this passage, as some of the evils against which he protested no longer exist.]

Other examples are furnished by Tshudi’s Travels in Peru, in the description which he gives of the treatment of the Peruvian soldiers at the hands of their officers; and by Macleod’s Travels in Eastern Africa, where the author tells of the cold-blooded and truly devilish cruelty with which the Portuguese in Mozambique treat their slaves.  But we need not go for examples to the New World, that obverse side of our planet.  In the year 1848 it was brought to life that in England, not in one,